Terra incognita: experiential education and creative tourism to raise economic prospective of youth in rural area

Rural area in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Croatia is characterized with low economic prospects of local youth due to lack of jobs, low entrepreneurship skills and other competencies among them, lower access to training programmes. In the same time the rural area wields a vast diverse natural, social, cultural and other potential which can be exploited to create the economic value and engage people. This has to be uncovered and utilized in first place by local youth who are starting their independent lives. Civic organizations engaged in rural development try to solve troubles of small communities, target rural youth with educational programmes. By pursuing own mission they start to develop experiential learning and other outdoor programmes often utilizing favourable natural and spacious potential of countryside. In our project we explored the field of social entrepreneurship and experiential education, engaged local people and youth in design of programmes and activities. By doing so we empowered them, improved their leadership and variety of other skills to be able to raise personal and economic prospects of own rural context. Specifically youngsters worked over the elaboration of experiential education products to stimulate incoming mobility of learners and tourists.Our project has set the following aims: 1) Empowerment of youth from rural areas where partners operate, development of their skills and competencies, especially of the sense of initiative and entrepreneurship; 2) Increase of incoming mobility in the communities where partners operate, specifically thanks to the development of educational and other creative programmes with experiential component; 3) Enhancement of cross-sectoral cooperation in communities, build-up of follow-up strategies based on the elaborated experiential programmes. Involvement of local youth in utilization and running of these programmes; 4) Exchange of experience on international level and international networking of the platforms involved in rural development, social entrepreneurship and non-formal education in their small communities. To achieve these the project was built from capacity building and the mobility activities starting from exchange of knowledge to practical interventions and follow-up actions. The project has generated the following outcomes: 2 international study visits, 1 seminar on youth entrepreneurship in rural area, 1 youth exchange with a lot of practical component, a large scale public event, elaboration of the thematic guide and media materials to boost thematic effect in target rural area, and eventual growing of thematic networking are those achievements that led us to the project goals. Much in the focus of the project was a Stina community (where Ukrainian partner evolves a rural educational platform) which hosted the large scale public event - “Festival of experiential education and traditional culture ‘Stina welcomes’ ”.After successfully implementing all of the activities planned the partners oversaw the following impact of the project: 1) Empowerment and stimulation of entrepreneurship among engaged rural youth in target communities. 2) Growth in programming of the partners, boost of their sustainability due to raising local leaders and followers. 3) Enhancement of inter-sectorial cooperation and deeper integration of partners in their communities that will help ignite other programmes of rural development and social innovations in future. 4) Popularization of experiential, educational and cultural mobility into rural area and particular stimulation of tourism interest towards the Stina village in Ukraine. 5) Design of thematic methodology for exploitation by other multipliers of experiential education in rural area. 6) Reinforcement of international networking between organizations running rural centers of non-formal education and rural social innovations.